Wild Mile brings kids together to learn about the Chicago River

Behind a row of industrial buildings and down a small path of stairs, a wooden platform skirts the rusting river wall, surrounded by floating gardens, sunken logs and quietly emerging microhabitats. With pops of color from its blue chairs and encroaching plant life, the platform sits at the North Branch canal of the Chicago River and regularly hosts eager students.

This learning platform is one of the latest additions to the Wild Mile, a 17-acre floating park that will stretch from North Avenue to Chicago Avenue. The project is spearheaded by environmental nonprofit Urban Rivers.

Nick Wesley, Urban Rivers co-founder, said he wants to make the project accessible to students of all backgrounds. An early collaboration with the nearby British School involved students designing and installing plants in floating gardens. Though a “huge success,” Wesley noted that not everyone can participate in such projects.

“One of the things is that the British school has a lot of resources, so they were able to do this type of thing,” Wesley said. “Whereas a lot of schools, it’s much more difficult and so we wanted to lower that barrier to entry, hence the learning platform where you can come down without renting kayaks or doing any big projects. You can just come down for a tour or some sort of session.”

On the learning platform, groups of students can work at different stations where they can test water quality, identify plants and learn about the river’s history.

The Wild Mile, which has largely been supported by city grants, philanthropic donations and partnerships with larger organizations like Shedd Aquarium, seeks to replenish and restore the river’s ecosystems, which have long been dormant due to the industrial nature of the river. In the 1850s, the river — in line with waterways across major cities — became a site of commercial transportation and the backyard to rows of factories, warehouses and waste management plants.

According to Phil Nicodemus, director of research at Urban Rivers, the river can host dozens of different environments in the space of just 1 mile. With floating gardens and smaller scale projects like sinking logs in the river, Wild Mile has already created a number of microhabitats supporting muskrats, turtles, mussels and more.

“A river within a mile can have like 20 different types of environments in it that make it so special and so diverse … It’s really just like, can we inch closer and closer to that? You’d like to do it all at once, but if you can’t, you just take the little victories where you can get them,” Nicodemus said.

Wesley emphasized that behind each step of the project’s planning and advancement is an emphasis on and prioritization of the river’s wildlife.

“It’s one of those things where the whole focus is a wildlife-first park,” Wesley said. “So everything we do, we want to make sure that it has a positive effect on the wildlife. They’re the main client in some ways — we focus on the wildlife and then we create a unique space for people.”

The new learning platform has already hosted more than 300 students in the past three months.

School tours fit into the learning platform’s broader mission of bridging the gap between youth from different backgrounds in the area.

The Rev. Randall Blakey, executive director of the Near North Unity Program, which seeks to promote “cohesion” in Chicago Near North community, recalled attending a planning meeting for the Wild Mile when it was in the early stages. He said he began to think of the Wild Mile not only as an “ecosystem for wildlife” but an “ecosystem for human life.”

Around this time, Blakey said he and the Near North Unity Program were coordinating a merger between the Jenner Academy of the Arts, located in the footprint of the former public housing complex Cabrini-Green, and Ogden International School in the Gold Coast, bringing together students with whom there had previously been “no interaction and no collaboration.”

“If we were to create a floating classroom, it would give us the opportunity to have kids that wouldn’t normally interact with each other in the Near North Side to come together and learn together,” he said.

Blakey, who said he saw a “moral imperative” for students to have a physical space where they could meet, was inspired by a quote from Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall: “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever begin to live together.” The quote was penned in a dissent in Milliken v. Bradley, in which the court ruled against busing across district lines to combat segregation unless the segregation was the product of discriminatory acts by the school districts.

The Wild Mile has made significant headway in the past year, with more to come in the coming months and years.

The group recently installed a floating garden near a distribution center that will be leased by Amazon in the South Branch of the river and received another grant from the city for $1.7 million to support more construction farther north.

The Wild Mile has partnered with the Shedd, which Wesley noted hopes to begin programs “outside their walls … in the community, instead of being kind of this isolated center.”

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“We’re building these gardens, we have a lot of research focus and habitat focus, which is right in line with some of the researchers that they have,” Wesley said.

Wild Mile and Shedd also had plans to install a series of six floating islands in August in the turning basin outside Bubbly Creek — a branch of the Chicago River that runs through Bridgeport and was the dumping grounds of the now-defunct Union Stock Yards — but a bureaucratic hitch may delay the undertaking.

The federal government may own the land below Bubbly Creek, Wesley said, which could cause permits to take longer than anticipated.

Regardless of when permits are approved, Wesley said the group plans to install more floating gardens in August, possibly moving them south from the original Bubbly Creek spot.

“The whole area is prime for this type of stuff … it’s historically one of the worst sections of river in the country,” he said.

Wesley said he hopes that with the help of Urban Rivers and the Wild Mile, the Chicago River can undergo a transformation similar to that of Millennium Park in the eyes of Chicago residents.

“Just using these kinds of corridors … in the future will be more or less boring. It’ll be universal, in the same way you think about Millennium Park. People forget it was a parking lot, you feel like it’s been a part of the city for much longer than it really has,” he said.